Entertainment

Selling Digital Goods On eBay? Only Through Classified Ads.

Brian Burke of eBay’s Trust &Safety department has a message for anyone wishing to unload digital products on the company’s trademark auction block: You can’t.

Instead, you’ll have to bypass the traditional transaction-based system that drives the vast majority of sales on the website and publish classified ads for things you want to sell that you can’t quite hold in your hand. The company cites the risk of feedback manipulation as a main reason for is choice to relegate sales of digital goods to a venue with non-auction parameters. The new rule was enacted March 31st.

If we’re to take human nature into account, this is a new law that understandably needs to be implemented and enforced. While it’d be an absolute pleasure to discover that all sellers looking to hawk bits to buyers work to do so through wholly legitimate means, it’d be much too much to expect for such business to be conducted entirely aboveboard. Rampant and unwarranted duplication would ensue, and because eBay is beholden to regulating activity within its auction framework (including the Buy-it-Now listings), it’s reasonable for the company to move to quash any allowance of digital sales via ordinary means.

Nonetheless, the company smartly still offers sellers interested in marketing digital goods the option to list classifieds devoid of any bidding utilities, in which it plays a sort of indirect facilitator of fully-electronic transactions. Sellers are required to pay a standard 30-day insertion fee of $9.95, plus any desired listing upgrades.

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